Monthly Archives: August 2017

I’m talking about Go at DevFest Siberia 2017

In September i’ll be speaking about Go at events in Russia and Taiwan.

DevFest Siberia 2017, September 23rd and 24th

I’ve been accepted to give two presentations at the GDG Novosibirsk DevFest Siberia 2017 event in Russia.

High performance servers without the event loop

Conventional wisdom suggests that the key to high performance servers are native threads, or more recently event loops. Neither solution is without downside. Threads carry a high overhead in terms of scheduling cost and memory footprint. Event loops lessen those costs, but introduce their own requirements for a complex callback driven style.

Go is a general purpose programming language in use in a wide range of domains and is well suited to writing network software. Go was introduced in 2009 with the explicit goal of helping programmers write programs that could solve problems of Google’s scale, and that means writing high performance servers.

This talk will focus on the features of the Go language and runtime environment, that allow programmers to write simple, high performance network services without resorting to native threads or event loop-driven callbacks.

Workshop: Exploring the Go execution tracer

As a complement to my conference talk I’ll be teaching a workshop on the Go execution tracer. This workshop follows on from my GolangUK presentation from last year and my High Performance Go workshop, and specifically focuses on the Go execution tracer,

The execution tracer is a new profiling and tracing facility integrated into Go since version 1.5. Unlike “external” profiling tools like pprof, valgrind, or perf, the execution tracer is integrated directly into the Go runtime, giving it detailed knowledge of the scheduler, the network poller, and the garbage collector.

In this workshop I will explain the operation of the execution tracer, how to collect, then analyse, the results of a trace. The audience will step through a set of problems, framed as the trace output of unknown programs to learn how to interpret the results from the execution tracer, improve our code to address performance or scalability bottlenecks, and verify the results.

You can find more information and purchase tickets for the event at the DevFest 2017 website.

Go Taiwan Meetup, Taipei, September 26th

I’ll be visiting the Go meetup in Taipei, Taiwan on the 26th of September. You can find details of the meetup soon on the GolangTW website.

Russian translation by Elena Grahovac

В сентябре я расскажу о Go на мероприятиях в России и Тайване.

DevFest Siberia 2017, Новосибирск, 23-24 сентября

Оргкомитет конференции DevFest Siberia 2017, которая пройдет в Новосибирске (Россия), принял мои заявки на два выступления.

Высокопроизводительные серверы без цикла событий

Бытует мнение, что ключом к написанию высокопроизводительных серверов является использование собственных потоков (native threads), место которых в последнее время занимают циклы событий (event loops). Однако, у обоих этих решений есть свои недостатки. Потоки, с точки зрения затрат на планирование и объем памяти, несут высокие накладные расходы. Циклы событий уменьшают эти затраты, но ставят определенные требования к витиеватым принципам разработки, основанной на callback’ах.

Go – это универсальный язык программирования, который используется в широком диапазоне областей и отлично подходит для написания сетевого программного обеспечения. Go был представлен в 2009 году, его цель – помочь разработчикам писать программы, которые могли бы решать задачи масштаба Google, то есть задачи написания высокопроизводительных серверов.

В этом докладе будут рассмотрены особенности языка и среды выполнения (runtime) Go, которые позволяют программистам писать простые высокопроизводительные сетевые сервисы, не прибегая к собственным потокам или callback’ам, связанным с циклом событий.

Мастер-класс: Изучаем трассировщик выполнения Go

В качестве дополнения к докладу я проведу мастер-класс по трассировщику выполнения (execution tracer) Go. Этот мастер-класс вытекает из моего доклада «Семь способов профилирования программы, написанной на Go» с прошлогодней конференции GolangUK и из моего мастер-класса «Высокая производительность Go». Новый мастер-класс фокусируется на трассировщике выполнения Go.

Трассировщик выполнения – это новое средство профилирования и трассировки, интегрированное в Go, начиная с версии 1.5. В отличие от «внешних» инструментов профилирования, таких как pprof, valgrind или perf, трассировщик выполнения интегрируется непосредственно в среду выполнения Go, предоставляя подробные сведения о планировщике (scheduler), сетевом поллере (network poller) и сборщике мусора (garbage collector).

В рамках мастер-класса я объясню, как работает трассировщик выполнения, и расскажу о том, как собрать, а затем проанализировать результаты трассировки. Шаг за шагом участники пройдут через набор задач, оформленных как вывод трассировки неизвестных программ, и узнают, как интерпретировать результаты трассировщика, улучшить код, устранить узкие места производительности или масштабируемости и проверить результаты.

Найти больше информации и приобрести билеты можно на сайте DevFest Siberia 2017.

Go Taiwan Meetup, Тайбэй, 26-е сентября

Я приеду на Go-митап в Тайбее (Тайвань) 26-го сентября. Детали мероприятия скоро появятся на сайте GolangTW.

The HERE IS key

The Lear Siegler ADM-3A terminal is a very important artefact in computing history.

ADM-3A keyboard (image credit vintagecomputer.ca)

If you want to know why your shell abbreviates $HOME to ~, it’s because of the label on the ~ key on the ADM-3A. If you want to know why hjkl are the de facto cursor keys in vi, look at the symbols above the letters. The ADM-3A was the “dumb terminal” which Bill Joy used to develop vi.

Recently the ADM-3A came up in a twitter discussion about the wretched Apple touch bar when Bret Victor dropped this tweet:

Which settled the argument until Paul Brousseau asked:

Indeed, what does the HERE IS1 key do? Its prominent position adjacent to the RETURN key implies whatever it does, it is important.

Fortunately the answer to Paul’s question was easy to find. The wonderful BitSavers archive has the user manual for the ADM-3A available (cached to avoid unnecessary bandwidth costs to BitSavers). On page 29 we find this diagram

Page 29, ADM-3A Users Manual (courtesy bitsavers.org)

So HERE IS, when pressed, transmits a predefined identification message. But what do to the words “message is displayed in half-duplex” mean? The answer to that riddle lies in the ADM-3A’s Answerback facility.

Scanning forward to page 36, section 3.3.6 describes the configuration of the Answerback facility–programming the identification message transmitted when HERE IS is pressed.

Section 3.3.6, page 36, ADM-3A Users Manual (courtesy bitsavers.org)

Pressing the HERE IS key or receiving an ENQ from the host … causes the answerback message to be transmitted to the host and to be displayed if the terminal is in half duplex mode.

This is interesting, the remote side can ask the terminal “who are you?”.

The HERE IS key is a vestige of a an older facility called Enquiry. Enquiry allowed one end of the connection to query if the remote side was still connected, and if it was, exactly who was connected.

ANSWERBACK Message
Answerback is a question and answer sequence where the host computer asks the terminal to identify itself. The VT100 answerback feature provides the terminal with the capability to identify itself by sending a message to the host. The entire answerback sequence takes place automatically without affecting the screen or requiring operator action. The answerback message may also be transmitted by typing CTRL-BREAK.

This description is from the 1978 Digital VT100 user guide. It was certainly a simpler time when the server could ask a terminal to identify itself, and trust the answer.

Notes

  1. I’ve chosen to write the name of the key in all caps as the base model of the ADM-3A was only capable of displaying upper case letters. If you wanted lower case (above 0x5F hex), that was an optional extra.

Context isn’t for cancellation

This is an experience report about the use of, and difficulties with, the context.Context facility in Go.

Many authors, including myself, have written about the use of, misuse of, and how they would change, context.Context in a future iteration of Go. While opinions differs on many aspects of context.Context, one thing is clear–there is almost unanimous agreement that the Context.WithValue method on the context.Context interface is orthogonal to the type’s role as a mechanism to control the lifetime of request scoped resources.

Many proposals have emerged to address this apparent overloading of context.Context with a copy on write bag of values. Most approximate thread local storage so are unlikely to be accepted on ideological grounds.

This post explores the relationship between context.Context and lifecycle management and asks the question, are attempts to fix Context.WithValue solving the wrong problem?

Context is a request scoped paradigm

The documentation for the context package strongly recommends that context.Context is only for request scoped values:

Do not store Contexts inside a struct type; instead, pass a Context explicitly to each function that needs it. The Context should be the first parameter, typically named ctx:

func DoSomething(ctx context.Context, arg Arg) error {
        // ... use ctx ...
}

Specifically context.Context values should only live in function arguments, never stored in a field or global. This makes context.Context applicable only to the lifetime of resources in a request’s scope. Given Go’s lineage on the server, this is a compelling use case. However, there exist other use cases for cancellation where the lifetime of the resource extends beyond a single request. For example, a background goroutine as part of an agent or pipeline.

Context as a hook for cancellation

The stated goal of the context package is:

Package context defines the Context type, which carries deadlines, cancelation signals, and other request-scoped values across API boundaries and between processes.

Which sounds great, but belies its catch-all nature. context.Context is used in three independent, yet sometimes conflated, scenarios:

  • Cancellation via context.WithCancel.
  • Timeout via context.WithDeadline.
  • A bag of values via context.WithValue.

At any point, a context.Context value can represent any one, or all three of these independent concerns. However, context.Context‘s most important facility, broadcasting a cancellation signal, is incomplete as there is no way to wait for the signal to be acknowledged.

Looking to the past

As this is an experience report, it would be germane to highlight some actual experience. In 2012 Gustavo Niemeyer wrote a package for goroutine lifecycle management called tomb which is used by Juju for the management of the worker goroutines within the various agents in the Juju system.

tomb.Tombs are concerned only with lifecycle management. Importantly, this is a generic notion of a lifecycle, not tied exclusively to a request, or a goroutine. The scope of the resource’s lifetime is defined simply by holding a reference to the tomb value.

A tomb.Tomb value has three properties:

  1. The ability to signal the owner of the tomb to shut down.
  2. The ability to wait until that signal has been acknowledged.
  3. A way to capture a final error value.

However, tomb.Tombs have one drawback, they cannot be shared across multiple goroutines. Consider this prototypical network server where a tomb.Tomb cannot replace the use of sync.WaitGroup.

func serve(l net.Listener) error {
        var wg sync.WaitGroup
        var conn net.Conn
        var err error
        for {
                conn, err = l.Accept()
                if err != nil {
                        break
                }
                wg.Add(1)
                go func(c net.Conn) {
                        defer wg.Done()
                        handle(c)
                }(conn)
        }
        wg.Wait()
        return err
}

To be fair, context.Context cannot do this either as it provides no built in mechanism to acknowledge cancellation. What is needed is a form of sync.WaitGroup that allows cancellation, as well as waiting for its participants to call wg.Done.

Context should become, well, just context

The purpose of the context.Context type is in it’s name:

context /kɒntɛkst/ noun
The circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood.

I propose context.Context becomes just that; a request scoped association list of copy on write values.

Decoupling lifetime management from context.Context as a store of request scoped values will hopefully highlight that request context and lifecycle management are orthogonal concerns.

Best of all, we don’t need to wait til Go 2.0 to explore these ideas like Gustavo’s tomb package.

Typed nils in Go 2

This is an experience report about a gotcha in Go that catches every Go programmer at least once. The following program is extracted from a larger version that caused my co-workers to lose several hours today.

package main

import "fmt"

type T struct{}

func (t T) F() {}

type P interface {
          F()
}

func newT() *T { return new(T) }

type Thing struct {
        P
}

func factory(p P) *Thing {
        return &Thing{P: p}
}

const ENABLE_FEATURE = false

func main() {
        t := newT()
        t2 := t
        if !ENABLE_FEATURE {
                t2 = nil
        }
        thing := factory(t2)
        fmt.Println(thing.P == nil)
}

This distilled version of the program in question, while non-sensical, contains all the attributes of the original. Take some time to study the program and ask yourself, does the program print true or false?

nil != nil

Not to spoil the surprise, but the program prints false. The reason is, while nil is assigned to t2, when t2 is passed to factory it is “boxed” into an variable of type P; an interface. Thus, thing.P does not equal nil because while the value of P was nil, its concrete type was *T.

Typed nil

You’ve probably realised the cause of this problem is the dreaded typed nil, a gotcha that has its own entry in the Go FAQ. The typed nil emerges as a result of the definition of a interface type; a structure which contains the concrete type of the value stored in the interface, and the value itself. This structure can’t be expressed in pure Go, but can be visualised with this example:

var n int = 200
var i interface{} = n

The interface value i is assigned a copy of the value of n, so i‘s type slot holds n‘s type; int, and it’s data slot holds the value 200. We can write this more concisely as (int, 200).

In the original program we effectively have the following:

var t2 *T = nil
var p P = t2

Which results in p, using our nomenclature, holding the value (*T, nil). So then, why does the expression p == nil evaluate to false? The explanation I prefer is:

  • nil is a compile time constant which is converted to whatever type is required, just as constant literals like 200 are converted to the required integer type automatically.
  • Given the expression p == nil, both arguments must be of the same type, therefore nil is converted to the same type as p, which is an interface type. So we can rewrite the expression as (*T, nil) == (nil, nil).
  • As equality in Go almost always operates as a bitwise comparison it is clear that the memory bits which hold the interface value (*T, nil) are different to the bits that hold (nil, nil) thus the expression evaluates to false.

Put simply, an interface value is only equal to nil if both the type and the value stored inside the interface are both nil.

For a detailed explanation of the mechanics behind Go’s interface implementation, Russ Cox has a great post on his blog.

The future of typed nils in Go 2

Typed nils are an entirely logical result of the way dynamic types, aka interfaces, are implemented, but are almost never what the programmer wanted. To tie this back to Russ’s GopherCon keynote, I believe typed nils are an example where Go fails to scale for programming teams.

This explanation has consumed 700 words–and several hours over chat today–to explain, and in the end my co-workers were left with a bad taste in their mouths. The clarity of interfaces was soured by a suspicion that gotchas like this were lurking in their codebase. As an experienced Go programmer I’ve learnt to be wary of the possibility of a typed nil during code review, but it is unfortunate that they remain something that each Go programmer has to learn the hard way.

For Go 2.0 I’d like to start the discussion of what it would mean if comparing an interface value to nil considered the value portion of the interface such that the following evaluated to true:

var b *bytes.Buffer
var r io.Reader = b
fmt.Println(r == nil)

There are obviously some subtleties that this pithy demand fails to capture, but a desire to make this seemingly straight forward comparison less error prone would, at least in my mind, make Go 2 easier to scale to larger development teams.